Dancing in Life's Whirling Embrace!

February 07, 2019

Building Sanctuaries for Climate Justice

Climate change has already displaced and will increasingly displace so many people, across and within national borders. One of the persistent fears during evacuations is that folks will not be permitted to return and will lose everything they value, from community to the structures that nurture their communities. This is not an irrational fear, because repeatedly, that’s what happens. What climate change intensified storms don’t strip away, local, state, and federal policies might and have. To attend to a particular story about that, check out Living on Earth January 25, 2019 episode, where Lewis Raven Wallace describes how a predominantly working-class and low income African American community in New Bern, North Carolina has been and continues to be displaced following a hurricane.

Rebuilding is expensive. Rebuilding to climate adaptive standards is even more expensive in the short term, though when building for resiliency, gives you better chances in the longer run. Many of the folks displaced by rising seas, intensified storms, and intensified droughts cannot rebuild, and there is no effort governmentally to try and keep communities together. Nor is there a spate of affordable climate adaptive housing being planned by the U.S. Housing and Urban Development Department. Where rebuilding needs to be set further away, so we can have better coastal buffers recognizing the rising seas and intensified storms, we need affordable resilient housing, not just housing for wealthy people.

This week in Parashat Terumah (Exodus 25:1-27:19) we read about the details required to create a space of awe and reverence, a sanctuary for the Holy. Before there is to be permanent housing and settlement for the people, they learn how to make a home for the Holy. In this home for the Holy, we welcome beauty, attention to detail, and the offerings each person and family can bring, the gifts we share as communities to create and care for such sacred spaces.

Following the flight into freedom, the people had to relearn how to be free, how to be a people, a community together. And that includes how to be a people of reverence and to create lives of dignity. Part of reorienting ourselves after displacement is to establish again those elements that craft us as a people, unite us, transform us, challenge us, welcome us, and give us dignity, meaning, and purpose. This is a need for displaced communities wherever we are in time. Today, we need to think about displaced communities, not only displaced individuals, and have policies and supportive programs and neighborly aid to hold communities together. Losing our community, we can lose very important parts of ourselves, our supportive networks, the people who know our stories and whose stories we know, to whom we belong and with whom we having dignity, purpose, and meaning. Displaced peoples also lose their sacred spaces, and part of keeping communities together and helping them resettle is to create again those sacred spaces, in different places and with inevitable differences, but still the community’s heart.

Individualism as an ideology ties into this ideology of meritocracy and both erase and ignore the truth of displacement. Can you imagine how different Exodus would read and we would be if the story wasn’t communal, but individual and everyone had to do for themselves rather than a community developing together? What we lose in displacement is more than individual loss; it is a loss of vital and vibrant community, history, and future together. When whole communities are displaced, whole communities need spaces to stay together. As the people in Exodus need to create such space, we all benefit from this part of home: a communal place of dignity and reverence, beauty, awe, and wonder. The community from New Bern, North Carolina, the communities displaced by five-year-drought in western Honduras, the communities displaced from Puerto Rico or the Florida Panhandle or Houston or New Orleans need communal reassembly spaces, places to become communities again and not be dispersed and assimilated and disappeared into losing so much of who they were before displacement.

Consider in your life where the places and spaces are that welcome you and yours to restful quiet, to joyful thanksgiving, to awe and wonder, and to needing and receiving your gifts gratefully? How do you feel without access to such spaces? Without a place where you and yours are met and loved and accepted as you are? Without a place where what you bring is needed and celebrated?

As people of heart how may we respond to the increasing numbers of internally and internationally displaced people, people displaced in large part due to climate change?

We make way and welcome, which allows communities to stay together, to reassemble, to create communal spaces that can house history, connection, heart, home, and spirit

We change policies to build and adapt affordable housing for or changing world, and not cruelly disperse folks or expect them individually to relocate and find what’s already non-existent or in short supply in many places

We tell, collect, and cultivate the stories of displacement and the diasporas that are part of our history and that are happening now and will be or future history

We work to slow and adapt to climate change, to intensified storms and droughts and to rising seas, community by community, at the larger level because our ability to survive is not about individual choice but communal ones.

We grant one another the spaces and places to create together sacred spaces of reverence, welcome, and celebration of our gifts.

May we steadfastly carry on to address climate change, to make welcome and space for one another, and to have a heart to create more justice in responding to displaced communities and peoples. May we unite to build sanctuaries for climate justice with our displaced communities.